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Idaho officials deliberately misled the public about the costs and application of the state’s death penalty and prison officials’ questionable efforts at obtaining execution drugs, according to evidence presented in week-long court hearings on the state’s execution secrecy practices. Testimony from January 28 through February 1, 2019 in an open-records lawsuit against the Idaho Department of Corrections has revealed that Idaho paid $10,000 in cash to an undisclosed drug supplier, maintained a set of fraudulent financial records related to execution expenses, falsely denied having records documenting contacts with a disreputable drug supplier in India, and hid from the public information as mundane as the hairdressers who give prisoners their final haircuts. The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU of Idaho on behalf of University of Idaho law professor Aliza Cover (pictured) after the IDOC refused to turn over numerous execution-related records to her in response to a 2017 public records request.

Relying on Idaho’s Public Records Act, Cover had sought copies of receipts, purchase orders, and other information related to the drugs Idaho used in its last two executions in 2011 and 2012 and those it expects to use in future executions. The department disclosed only a copy of the state’s execution policy manual, but claimed the remaining documents were exempt from public scrutiny. Cover, who studies the death penalty and its application, sued, asking the court to order the records disclosed. Even then, IDOC resisted. In actions ACLU attorney Molly Kafka characterized as “relying on speculation and fear rather than data,” IDOC redacted dozens of items from execution records, including not only the names of prison staff who participated in executions, but their handwriting, and the names of people only tangentially involved in executions, such as clergy who counsel death-row prisoners and hairdressers who give prisoners their final haircuts. The state claimed, without evidence, that the redactions were necessary to protect those individuals from protest, harassment, or violence. Similar claims of threats against execution team members in other states have been found to be unsubstantiated. Idaho officials also withheld information on the source of execution drugs used in the past, claiming that suppliers would no longer provide the drugs if their identities were revealed. IDOC falsely told investigative reporterChris McDaniel that records he had requested did not exist. In fact, records showed that Idaho had contact with Chris Harris—a drug supplier in India who had obtained drugs from a European pharmaceutical company for medical use in Africa and then misappropriated them instead for sale for executions in the United States.

Testimony at the trial also revealed that IDOC’s secrecy efforts extended to fraudulent recordkeeping practices. According to a former Idaho Department of Corrections employee, IDOC kept three sets of financial books because the department “did not want to show a tremendous amount of money being spent for the execution as well as for the anonymity for those involved in it.” When a person would ask the IDOC for execution-related data, the first set of books would be given out. A second set of books would be provided if the person persisted. “So, the first set would be a lower amount to not represent the total of what was being spent, and the second one had a little higher amount just to show due diligence — that there was work being done to capture all the amounts,” the official said. According to the official, “the third was the actual set of books that would actually represent the expenses.”

Testifying during the trial, Cover said: “If the public is not able to have this information about those issues, [it] cannot come to a decision on its moral view about the punishment that is occurring.” In closing statements Monday, February 4, 2019, one of her lawyers said: “[IDOC’s] argument at this point is crystal clear — this information is so important that we can’t release it, because it would change the way we do things.” An editorial by the Idaho Press urged the state to end the secrecy: “In the end, the state of Idaho needs to be transparent about the drugs it’s using for lethal injections and about where they’re getting those drugs. We see no exemption in the public records law for protecting a relationship with a drug provider.”

For the first time since Georgia brought back the death penalty in 1973, the state will go five years without imposing any death sentences. No jury has handed down a death sentence since March 2014 and, with no capital trials scheduled for February or March, the state is nearly certain to reach the 5-year milestone. The decline in death sentencing is even more dramatic in light of the fact that, prior to 2015, Georgia had never gone two consecutive years without a death sentence. Experts attribute the decline primarily to two factors: improved death-penalty representation and the availability of life without parole.

Georgia’s Office of the Capital Defender — a statewide death-penalty public defender office — represents nearly everyone facing the death penalty in the state. The capital defender has reduced the number of death sentences by thoroughly investigating the life and mental health histories of its clients and working with prosecutors before trials even begin to reach non-capital dispositions. In December 2015, Jerry Word, who heads the state defender office, credited those efforts with preempting numerous capital trials. Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in January 2019 that the capital defender’s office “has become real good at identifying mitigating factors for a defendant and talking about that with prosecutors long before lines are drawn in the sand. This has made a real difference, and you save the resources and the time required of a death-penalty case and the victims don’t have to go through the years-long process.” In 2014, only one of the state's 19 potential capital cases ended in a death sentence and, by the end of 2015, that case had been the only one of the preceding 71 cases handled by the capital defender that had resulted in a death verdict. Since 2015, the capital defender has closed 69 death-penalty cases, of which just five went to trial and none resulted in a death sentence.

Both defense attorneys and prosecutors said that the availability of life without parole as a sentencing option also has fundamentally changed the way potentially capital cases are tried and the verdicts juries reach. Prior to 2009, life without parole was not an option in Georgia unless prosecutors actually sought the death penalty. Now, prosecutors may seek life without parole without capitally prosecuting a defendant. Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds said, “[t]he majority of prosecutors around the state are now convinced that a life-without-parole sentence actually means what it says. It’s made a huge difference.” As a result, prosecutors now file notices to seek death much less often. In 2005, Georgia prosecutors filed 40 notices of intent to seek the death penalty. By 2011, that number had dropped to 26, and in 2017, it was just three.

The decline in death sentences paints a sharp contrast between the way cases were handled in the past and how they are handled today. According to Steve Bright, former director and president of the Georgia-based Southern Center for Human Rights, the people on Georgia’s death row did not commit worse crimes than today’s defendants, they simply faced a worse system. The state has executed 19 prisoners since a jury last imposed a death sentence in the state, in cases criticized as out of step with current practices and emblematic of systemic problems with the state’s death penalty. “Those are people who were sentenced to death some time ago often with lawyers who were not qualified to try a death-penalty case,” Bright said, describing Georgia’s death-row prisoners. “They are also people who would not be sentenced to death today.”

A federal appeals court has found 80-year-old Charles Ray Finch (pictured) “actually innocent” of the murder for which he was convicted and sentenced to death in North Carolina 42 years ago. The pronouncement came in a unanimous ruling issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on January 25, 2019. In that decision, Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory wrote that “Finch has overcome the exacting standard for actual innocence through sufficiently alleging and providing new evidence of a constitutional violation and through demonstrating that the totality of the evidence, both old and new, would likely fail to convince any reasonable juror of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The U.S. Supreme Court has never recognized innocence alone as grounds to overturn a conviction, so the appeals court could not set Finch free. Instead, the panel reversed a lower court’s denial of relief and sent the case back for adjudication of constitutional violations relating to Finch’s innocence claim. Jim Coleman, Finch’s lawyer and the co-director of the Duke Wrongful Convictions Clinic, said he now hopes to convince North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein to “remedy the miscarriage of justice in joining us in a motion to overturn Ray’s conviction and release him without any further proceedings in court.”

Finch was convicted and sentenced to death in 1976 for the killing of Richard “Shadow” Holloman during a failed robbery attempt, but he has consistently maintained his innocence. In 1977, the North Carolina Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the state’s then-mandatory death penalty law unconstitutional. The Fourth Circuit identified significant problems with the evidence used to convict Finch. He was subjected to “suggestive lineups,” in which he was the only suspect dressed in a three-quarter length jacket, the same style of clothing that the eyewitness, Lester Floyd Jones, said the perpetrator was wearing. Such lineups have since been declared unconstitutional. “These procedural issues support Finch’s allegations of constitutional error that he was misidentified by Jones,” Judge Gregory wrote. “No reasonable juror would likely find Finch guilty beyond a reasonable doubt if it knew the high likelihood that he was misidentified by Jones both outside and inside the courtroom as a murder suspect because of the impermissibly suggestive lineups.” The court also noted that Jones, who the court said “had cognitive issues, struggled with alcoholism and had issues with short-term memory recall,” told police that the killer was armed with a sawed-off shotgun and had never mentioned to the police that the shooter had any facial hair. At the time Holloman was killed, Finch had a long beard and distinctive sideburns. A new review of the autopsy evidence decades after the crime disclosed that Holloman had been killed with a pistol, not a shotgun and new ballistics evidence contradicted prosecution claims that the shells found at the crime scene matched a shotgun shell found in Finch’s car. Other witnesses also indicated they had been pressured into providing testimony implicating Finch. “This new evidence,” the court said, “not only undercuts the state’s physical evidence, but it also discredits the reliability of Jones.”

Texas executed Robert Jennings (pictured) on January 30, 2019 for the 1988 murder of Houston police officer Elston Howard, amid questions as to his eligibility for capital punishment and the constitutionality of his death sentence. Jennings was convicted under a sentencing procedure that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down shortly before his trial in 1989 because it did not adequately allow jurors to consider evidence supporting a sentence less than death. The jury instructions given in his case to redress that error were also later declared unconstitutional, and 25 Texas death-row prisoners had their death sentences overturned as a result. However, Jennings’s court-appointed trial and appeal lawyers failed to raise the issue in Texas state court and the Texas federal courts refused to consider the issue on the grounds that the state court lawyers had procedurally defaulted the claim. The U.S. Supreme Court later changed federal habeas corpus procedures to permit review if ineffective state-court representation caused the default. But when Jennings’s federal lawyers attempted to raise the issue again, the Texas federal appeals court ruled on January 28 that its prior decision had not been based on procedural default and that it had already rejected the claim. Without comment, the Supreme Court issued an order on January 30 declining to hear Jennings’s case, and he was executed.

In challenging Jennings’s death sentence, his current lawyers also argued that both Jennings’s trial lawyer and his previous appellate attorney provided inadequate representation. Jennings’s trial attorney was defending two death-penalty cases at the same time and did not investigate significant mitigating evidence that included Jennings’s history of brain damage from a car crash and an injury with a baseball bat, an IQ of 65, and intellectual and adaptive deficits associated with his low IQ. Trial counsel also failed to present readily available evidence of Jennings’s impoverished, abusive, and neglectful upbringing: he was born as the result of a rape, and his mother frequently told him she did not want him. His original appeal lawyers also failed to raise these issues. Edward Mallett, one of Jennings’s current lawyers, said, “There has not been an adequate presentation of his circumstances including mental illness and mental limitations.”

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes took the unusual step earlier in January of asking the state to consider supporting clemency for Jennings, citing the 30-year delay between the crime and the scheduled execution. Jennings's attorneys argued in his clemency petition that the state had granted clemency last year to a white death-row prisoner with fewer mitigating circumstances. "Denying a commutation truly will demonstrate that race, class, and privilege matter in determining who is executed in Texas," attorney Randy Schaffer wrote. "This would send a terrible message to the world."

Stephen Curry (pictured, right, during a 2015 visit to the White House), star of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and executive producer of the upcoming documentary Emanuel, has publicly voiced his opposition to the death penalty. Emanuel tells the story of the murder of nine Black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof. It is the first film produced by Curry’s production company, Unanimous Media, and was co-produced by Viola Davis’s company JuVee Productions. After a January 23, 2019 advance screening at Howard University, Curry participated in a panel discussion of the movie’s themes, including faith, race relations, forgiveness, gun violence, and the death penalty. Asked about his views on the death penalty and Dylann Roof’s death sentence, Curry said, “I don’t believe in the death penalty. I feel like there are situations where an individual can be redeemed or be healed and mentally or physically with whatever the issue is and the root of why they are in that situation.” Curry also spoke about taking inspiration from the forgiveness that victims’ family members offered to Roof. “It’s hard for me to put myself in their shoes and empathize with what they’re going through. But it’s so inspiring the way they handled it. They chose forgiveness. They chose faith. They chose to support each other and the community. That alone speaks volumes for humanity and hope of humanity.”

Curry also addressed the issue of athletes becoming involved in social causes. “Athletes in general, especially in the NBA, guys are educated. They know what they’re talking about,” he said. “They know what they believe. And there’s a reason when you say something there are headlines. People want to hear what you have to say. We shouldn’t shy away from it.” He praised the NBA and its commissioner, Adam Silver, for “support[ing] us in using our voice to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves. And I think this era of athlete is unafraid to be unapologetically themselves, whatever that means.”

Emanuel will be released in select theaters on June 17, 2019, the fourth anniversary of the shooting at Emanuel AME Church.

The Missouri Supreme Court may soon rule on the constitutionality of the state’s practice of having the trial judge determine whether a capital defendant should live or die if the sentencing jury is unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Death-row prisoner Marvin Rice (pictured) was sentenced to death by the trial judge in August 2017, even though 11 of the 12 jurors in his case voted for a life sentence. His appeal, which the state court heard on January 23, 2019, argues that the portion of Missouri’s death-penalty statute that gives the trial judge exclusive sentencing authority in the event of a hung sentencing jury violates his “constitutionally protected rights to due process, a trial by jury, and to a unanimous jury verdict.”

At the time of the offense, Rice – a former deputy sheriff and disabled Army veteran – was suffering from a major depressive disorder that had been worsened by the effects of a pituitary gland tumor. Court documents indicated that he had been diagnosed with 12 various medical and psychiatric conditions for which he had been taking 17 different medications. Eleven jurors were persuaded by this and other mitigating evidence that Rice’s life should be spared, but a single hold-out juror for death hung the jury. Trial judge Kelly Wayne Parker then disregarded the jury’s vote and sentenced Rice to death.

Rice’s appeal also challenges the constitutionality of Missouri’s capital punishment statute on the grounds that virtually any homicide now qualifies as a capital offense. This, he argues, violates the constitutional requirement that the death penalty be limited to a narrow class of the worst-of-the-worst killings. He also seeks a new trial based upon police and prosecutorial misconduct in his case. Police, he says, unconstitutionally continued to interrogate him while he was hospitalized for gunshot wounds sustained during his arrest, even after he had said he did not want to answer their questions. He also argues that the prosecutor repeatedly violated his constitutional right to remain silent, improperly commenting on both his decision not to testify at trial and his refusal to answer police questions after having been given his Miranda warnings. Rice’s lawyer, Craig Johnston told the state justices: “This court has repeatedly held that where an objection is made and overruled as happened here, a direct reference to the defendant’s failure to testify will invariably result in a new trial.”

Only Missouri and Indiana allow a judge to impose a death sentence following a jury deadlock in the sentencing phase of a capital trial. Alabama also allows a judge to impose a death sentence following a non-unanimous jury sentencing vote, but only if at least ten jurors vote for death. No jury in Missouri has imposed a death sentence since 2013, but judges sentenced Rice and Craig Wood to death after juries could not reach a unanimous sentencing decision. Wood was sentenced to death in 2018 after his jury voted 10-2 for a death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed the constitutionality of Missouri’s hung jury sentencing practice. However, in 2016, the Court struck down Florida’s death sentencing statute saying its provision requiring the judge, rather than a jury, to find facts necessary to impose a death sentence violated the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial.

On January 14, federal magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued an opinion likening Ohio’s current three-drug execution process to a combination of waterboarding and chemical fire. Judge Mertz wrote: “If Ohio executes Warren Henness under its present protocol, it will almost certainly subject him to severe pain and needless suffering. Reading the plain language of the Eighth Amendment, that should be enough to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.” Nonetheless, Merz allowed the execution to go forward, saying the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2015 ruling in the lethal-injection case Glossip v. Gross prevented him from granting a stay. Glossip requires a prisoner who challenges an execution protocol to provide an alternative method that is “available, feasible and can be readily implemented,” a standard Mertz said that Henness was unable to meet. Henness’s attorneys applauded the governor’s decision to issue a reprieve. “The evidence presented in the federal court hearing made it clear that moving forward under the current lethal-injection protocol would subject Mr. Henness to needless pain and suffering, in direct violation of his rights under state law and the state and federal constitutions,” said David Stebbins of the federal public defender’s office. “We commend Governor DeWine for his leadership and for ensuring the justice system operates humanely in Ohio."

Merz’s ruling described several problems with the use of midazolam, the first drug in Ohio’s lethal-injection protocol. He said that — contrary to the evidence available to the Court at the time of Glossip — midazolam does not render the prisoner sufficiently unconscious to block the painful effects of the second drug, a paralytic, and the third drug, potassium chloride, which he said would feel “as though fire was being poured” through the prisoner’s veins. He also noted that 24 of 28 available autopsies from midazolam executions showed the prisoner experienced pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs, which he said was “painful, both physically and emotionally, inducing a sense of drowning and the attendant panic and terror, much as would occur with the torture tactic known as waterboarding.”

Ohio has struggled to find a constitutionally and legally acceptable method of execution. Its state law holds that executions must be “quick and painless.” After the 2014 botched execution of Dennis McGuire, the state changed its protocol, removing midazolam. It reversed course in October 2016, announcing a three-drug protocol beginning with midazolam. In January 2017, Judge Merz halted three executions because he said the protocol amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Sixth Circuit upheld that decision, but the full Sixth Circuit court reversed it in June 2017, allowing executions to resume. Since 2014, Ohio has carried out three executions, while 33 have been delayed by court decisions or by the state’s inability to obtain lethal-injection drugs.

Charles Wright (pictured), a prisoner on Tennessee’s death row, may die of cancer before the October 10, 2019 execution date that the state has set for him. His attorneys and supporters, including a former U.S. Congressman, are seeking clemency so Wright can spend his final days with his family. Wright has prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, and was recently moved from Tennessee’s death-row facility to a prison infirmary. He is asking the governor to either reduce his sentence to time served or to life without parole, allowing him to apply for a medical furlough, a special release that can be granted to terminally ill prisoners, but not to those on death row.

In September 2018, former Congressman Bob Clement wrote to then-Governor Bill Haslam, asking Haslam to grant clemency to Wright. “It is clear to me that Charles is not among the ‘worst of the worst’ for whom the ultimate punishment is to be reserved,” Clement wrote. “He was a product of his environment and the deprivation in which he — I will not say ‘was raised’ as the fact is, Charles and his siblings basically raised themselves. He turned to drugs early in his teenage years — he was fourteen or fifteen when an older drug dealer put a heroin needle in Charles’ arm. Charles does not absolve himself of his responsibility for making wrong choices.” Clement’s father, Frank Clement, served as governor of Tennessee in the 1960s, and commuted all the state’s death sentences in 1965, after the legislature defeated an abolition bill by one vote.

In court filings, Wright’s attorneys also raised issues of arbitrariness and racial bias. Wright, who is Black, was convicted and sentenced to death for a drug-related double-homicide in 1985. According to his attorneys, capital cases in the 1980s were infected with racial bias, and Wright’s case exemplifies the arbitrariness of Tennessee’s death penalty. While Wright was sentenced to death, many other drug-related murders have resulted in life sentences, even when there were more than two victims. A 2018 study of Tennessee's death-penalty system called it “a cruel lottery” and found that the best indicators of whether a case would result in a death sentence were arbitrary factors such as where the murder occurred, the race of the defendant, the quality of the defense, and the views of the prosecutors and judges assigned to the case.

The United States Supreme Court has declined to review challenges brought by two Oklahoma death-row prisoners who alleged that their death sentences were the unconstitutional product of racial bias. Julius Jones and Tremane Woodhad sought to overturn their death sentences based on the findings of a 2017 study that showed significant racial disparities in Oklahoma’s death sentencing practices. On January 22, 2019, the Court denied the petitions for writ of certiorari after having rescheduled consideration of Jones’s (pictured, left) and Wood’s (pictured, right) cases 25 times each.

In their petitions for certiorari, Jones and Wood relied upon a statistical study of Oklahoma death sentences imposed between 1990 and 2012 to argue that racial bias unconstitutionally infected their death sentences. In 2017, the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission released a report on the state’s administration of the death penalty that included the findings of Dr. Glenn L. Pierce and professors Michael L. Radelet and Susan Sharp about the impact of race on death sentences. The study found that a murder defendant in Oklahoma accused of killing a white victim was more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death than a defendant accused of murdering a nonwhite victim. In cases like Jones’s and Wood’s, which involved only male victims, the study found that death sentences were nearly three times more likely to be imposed if the victim was white than if the victim was a person of color. It also found that when the victim was a white male, defendants of color, like Jones and Wood, were twice as likely as a white defendant to be sentenced to death.

Jones and Wood described other evidence that racial bias affected decisionmakers in their cases. The judge who presided over Wood's trial has made openly racist remarks, saying in 2011 that Mexicans are “nothing but filthy animals.” Jones was sentenced to death by a nearly all-white jury, following what his current lawyers describe as “pervasive and highly racialized pre-trial media coverage” and “racialized remarks made by prosecutors and at least one juror” during his trial. Dale Baich, one of Jones’s appellate lawyers, told The Oklahoman, that the facts of the case “vividly show how racial bias can lead to a wrongful conviction.” Jones is scheduled to file a separate petition for certiorari on January 28 raising the issue that one of the jurors in the case said “they should just take the n****r out and shoot him behind the jail.”

A bipartisan coalition of Wyoming legislators has introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. On January 15, 2019, Cheyenne Republican State Representative Jared Olsen (pictured, left) and Republican State Senator Brian Boner (pictured, right), introduced HB145, which would repeal the death penalty and replace it with a judicially imposed sentence of life without parole or life imprisonment. The bill, co-sponsored by sixteen other representatives and senators, has the backing of several legislative leaders, including Speaker of the House Steve Harshman, R-Casper, and Senate Minority Leader Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie. “You’ve got social conservatives and libertarians and that’s a little more of a mix than we’ve had before,” Olsen said. “And then if you look at the heavy hitters on the bill, we’ve got three-quarters of the House leadership on the bill.”

A coalition of outside organizations that includes he League of Women Voters of Wyoming, the Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne, and the ACLU of Wyoming also are supporting the repeal effort. The groups released a statement on January 16 calling the death penalty “a costly and unfair practice that does not enhance public safety or promote justice in Wyoming.” The breadth of the support distinguishes this year’s effort to abolish capital punishment from prior efforts over the past five years, according to Rep. Olsen. “The momentum and desire behind all those groups is just flourishing right now,” he said. “They’re coming to me every day, working different legislators and reporting back to me on what they’re doing. I think there’s a lot of outreach in the community as well. There’s a lot of momentum.”

Proponents of the bill say that Wyoming’s death penalty is impractical and costs too much. The state has only carried out one execution since 1976, and does not currently have any prisoners facing an active death sentence. (The death sentence imposed on Dale Wayne Eaton, who had been the state’s only death-row prisoner, was overturned in 2014, and federal appeals relating to that grant of relief are still pending.) Despite the rarity of the death penalty in Wyoming, the fiscal note that accompanies the abolition bill estimates it would cost the state $750,000 to maintain capital punishment in 2020. “We continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to maintain the death penalty,” Sen. Boner said. “I believe the availability of a life without parole sentence adequately balances the need to protect public safety while recognizing the need to reduce the strain on taxpayer resources.”

The Casper Star-Tribune editorialized in 2013 that life without parole was a better option than the death penalty for many family members of murder victims. The current abolition efforts have also gained the editorial support of the Powell Tribune, which wrote on January 22 that “[i]t seems that, for all practical purposes, the death penalty has already been abolished in Wyoming.” Noting that “like anything else that involves people, [the Wyoming legal system] will sometimes get it wrong,” the paper said that when someone is wrongfully executed, “that mistake is irreversible. And it’s a risk that’s not worth taking.”

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Latest News

NEWS (3/13): Governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on executions in California, granting reprieves to the 737 prisoners on the state's death row. He has also withdrawn the state's execution protocol and closed the death chamber in San Quentin prison. You can view Governor Newsom's news conference announcing the moratorium here.

TENNESSEE: The Tennessee House voted 73-22 on March 18 to pass a bill that would remove the appeal to the court of criminal appeals in death-penalty cases. HB 0258 would allow for direct appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, eliminating one level of appellate review in death-penalty cases.

ARKANSAS: The Arkansas Senate approved a sweeping execution secrecy bill on March 13 by a vote of 25-9. SB 464 would conceal from the public documents and information relating to the state's purchase of execution drugs and the identity of the drug supplier and make disclosure of such information a felony.

NEBRASKA: The Judiciary Committee of the Nebraska unicameral legislature voted 5-2 on March 15 to advance to the full Senate LB44, a bill that would repeal the state's death penalty. The legislature repealed the death penalty in 2015 and overrode Governor Rickett's veto of the bill. However, enactment of the bill was suspended pending the outcome of a voter referendum in 2016 that blocked the bill from going into effect. See Recent Legislative Activity.

TENNESSEE: The House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Criminal Justice voted on March 13 to send HB1455 to the full committee for a hearing on whether defendants who suffered from severe mental illness at the time of the offense should be exempted from the death penalty.

NEWS (3/4): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has overturned the death sentence of Arizona death-row prisoner Christopher Spreitz. A divided panel of the court ruled 2-1 that the Arizona courts unconstitutionally required Speitz to prove that his history of substance abuse had a causal link to the offense before it could be given any weight as mitigating evidence to potentially spare his life.

NEWS (3/4): The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari in the case of Searcey v. Dean, declining to review the $28 million judgment a federal jury entered against Gage County, Nebraska as a result of the wrongful prosecution and conviction of “the Beatrice Six” for a rape and murder they did not commit. Several of the wrongfully accused falsely confessed or testified falsely against others after having been threatened with the death penalty.NEWS (3/1): The Harris County District Attorney's office has accepted the recommendation of a Special Prosecutor's report that death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown be declared "actually innocent." The declaration paves the way for Brown to collect compensation from the state of Texas for his wrongful conviction and death sentence.

NEWS (2/28): Texas has executed Billie Wayne Coble. It was the third execution in the U.S. in 2019 and the second in Texas. Coble, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, was the 560th prisoner executed in Texas since executions resumed in the 1970s, nearly 5 times more than any other state. See Execution List 2019 and Execution Database.

Texas authorities removed Coble's son Gordon Wayne Coble and grandson Dalton Wayne Coble from the execution witness room following an outburst after the lethal injection drugs were administered and charged them with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

NEWS (2/28): The California Supreme Court has upheld convictions and death sentences imposed on Oswaldo Amezcua and Joseph Flores by a Los Angeles County jury in 2005. Neither defendant presented any mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of their joint trial.

NEWS (2/28): A three-judge panel sentenced Arron Lawson to death for a quadruple murder in Lawrence County, Ohio. It was the second new death sentence of 2019, both imposed after defendants were permitted to waive their right to jury sentencing. In January, a Jackson County, Florida judge sentenced Rocky Beamon to death after Beamon waived his right to a jury sentencing and asked the court for a death sentence.

NEWS (2/22): California Governor Gavin Newsome has ordered that more extensive DNA testing be performed in the case of death-row prisoner Kevin Cooper. Cooper has long maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder for which he was sentenced to death.

NEWS (2/19): The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari, declining to review an appeal filed by Arkansas Judge Wendell Griffen challenging the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision barring him from handling any capital cases as a result of his participation in an anti-death penalty rally in which he strapped himself to a gurney to protest executions.

Howard University law professor Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC's November 2018 report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. Konrad, the lead author of the report, provides an overview of the expansion of state secrecy in the use of the death penalty, and the three discuss the policy implications of the lack of accountability and transparency in the administration of capital punishment.

DPIC'S YEAR END REPORT: The Death Penalty Information Center's 2018 analysis of developments in the U.S. death penalty,The Death Penalty in 2018: Year End Report reports that death-penalty usage remained near generational lows, with executions below 30 and new death sentences below 50 for the fourth straight year. The size of death row dropped nationwide for the 18th year in a row. Read the report here. Listen to our Discussions With DPIC podcast about the report here.

LATEST EXONERATION: Former death-row prisoner Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin was exonerated in Florida on November 5, 2018, as Seminole County prosecutors dropped all charges against him. He is the 164th person wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death to have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1973, and the 28th exonerated in Florida. See Innocence.

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham testified on February 19 before the New Hampshire House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee on the bill to replace New Hampshire's death penalty with life without possibility of parole. That testimony, which addressed the question of whether the death penalty has made the public and New Hampshire police safer, has now been uploaded to YouTube. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWgyllPbXN0.

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DPIC Podcast Series: We have begun a new set of podcasts on the death penalty in each state, each with interesting historical facts. The following are now available: Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Check out our podcasts now! Also listen to DPIC's podcasts on death penalty issues.